A multitude of Malkovich

His screen persona hovers between Casanova and Hannibal Lecter, yet in real life he's like Freud with a hint of Art Garfunkel. Gaby Wood met the many-sided actor, who has just turned director, in Paris

I arrive at the plush hotel in Paris where John Malkovich has asked me to meet him, just in time to watch him slope down the corridor like a lazy catwalk model. He takes off the trench coat he's wearing over a smart black suit and tie, orders a coffee and welcomes me with a broad smile.

The smile, frankly, is disconcerting. Everything else - the designer outfit, the gait Bernardo Bertolucci once described as that of a Yugoslav footballer combined with a ballerina - I was expecting. But Malkovich's face is almost unimaginable without his trademark unflinching glower. Here is a man, after all, whose combined acting roles add up to a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Casanova. He made his name on stage as the violent brother in Sam Shepard's True West; he was the scheming sexual predator of Dangerous Liaisons, the murdering mastermind of In the Line of Fire and Con Air. And his life seems not to have lagged far behind his art: he is known to have stalked his own stalker with a bowie knife (after going home to change into a less expensive suit), and to have smashed a tailor's shop to pieces when his shirts arrived a little late.

'What's happened to your temper?' I ask.

'I still have a temper, I suppose,' Malkovich says in his whispering, dreamy voice - as if reaching into his consciousness for something vaguely familiar. There is a long, floating pause. His eyes drift up, down and around a small corner of the room.

'Here's a good example,' he says finally. 'The other day I was walking down the street in the rural town where we live and a truck hit me, rather hard, going fairly fast. And he starts to drive off, so I chase after him, reach in the window and grab his steering wheel. And I say, "Normally, in a civilised society, when we hit someone with a truck, we might inquire as to their wellbeing." So he said, "I'm sorry," and I said, "Great. Try and be a little more careful and that would be fantastic, and so sorry to have troubled you." I walk another 30 metres and he pulls up beside me a second time - and asks me if he can have an autograph.'

Malkovich gives me a deadpan look that seems to mean: nothing in the world will ever make any sense. 'I just...' he concludes, 'I don't quite get it. I guess that means that if you cut me in half with a chainsaw, I'll put your kids through school.'

Though he may be better known for more openly aggressive outbursts, this is a perfect Malkovich story: he's thought it over, and the outrage lies not so much in his own behaviour as in the irony of it all. What he reports himself as saying is not rude but rather alarmingly courteous, and when he tells it his voice never breaks its wafting tone. More than anything, Malkovich's voice - a reedy, faintly orgasmic drawl - is his signature. Perhaps not since Cary Grant has an actor been so vocally distinctive. (There's a running gag in the movie Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich is wrongly thought to have played a jewel thief - presumably a nod to Cary Grant.) In this case, you get the impression that the truck driver would never have guessed it was him had Malkovich not opened his mouth and demanded an apology in that strangely cloaked, excessively well-mannered eighteenth-century way.

Eleven years ago, when Malkovich came to London to star in the play Burn This, there was a TV documentary made about him. He came across as a smooth-looking, potentially angry young man, who would every now and then start to look a little mischievous. Now he is much more contained and calm. He has set up a production company, which has a number of more or less intellectual projects in progress, and he has just directed his first film, The Dancer Upstairs, which is based on the true story of the Shining Path in Peru and stars Oscar nominee Javier Bardem. Malkovich seems very different from the person he played only a couple of years ago in the film that took his life as its name. His hair has grown grey and curly at the sides of his high forehead, and he has a small, silvery goatee. He looks like Sigmund Freud, with a hint of Art Garfunkel.

What he says seems less capricious now than gnomic, and there's a sort of sardonic wisdom in almost all of it. On terrorism, for example, he purrs: 'I think it'll just go on... we should invest in cemeteries.' He says of psychoanalysis, which he went through for many years: 'To me, it certainly beats religion, which is only less expensive in the short term.' He comments that film is a 'shallow medium', and adds, witheringly: 'I mean, there's a reason screens are only this thick.'

Malkovich is a man of many apparent contradictions: an actor who mostly works in film but claims to feel more comfortable on stage, a sex symbol who finds sex scenes 'humiliating', a sportsman who bakes pies and sews, a boy from the American Midwest who models, on occasion, for Comme Des Garçons.

I ask when he first became aware of fashion, and Malkovich explains that it was early on. 'It's something I always liked. I don't know where that came from. I always imagine it was from being very fat as a child.' A story is often told about the young Malkovich: he lost several stone in the space of a couple of months by eating nothing but Jell-O. 'I was a very good baseball player and football player as a kid,' he goes on, reflecting on his sartorial vanity, 'but my father always told me - occasionally while striking me - that I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. And I think there's great truth in that.' A couple of years ago he directed two short films for the designer Bella Freud. 'Of course it's trivial,' he says of fashion, 'but then most things are.'

Bertolucci, who directed him in The Sheltering Sky, described Malkovich's anti-Method acting: he would do needlepoint between takes, and never mull over the role. He has, says Bertolucci, 'an incredible violence - that's why he's so sweet'. Stephen Frears, who directed him in Dangerous Liaisons , still Malkovich's best film, admires his 'silliness', and says he thinks of the supposedly fiery actor as 'adorable'.

It is perhaps indicative that one of Malkovich's abandoned projects was a biopic of Howard Hughes. It could never work, he explains, because Hughes was fundamentally contradictory and inexplicable. Once, Malkovich says, Hughes disappeared for nine months, and when he came back all he had in his suitcase was a dentist's drill and a woman's dress. 'Yes,' he muses, 'one could say he was a transvestite with some... denture issues. But is that really what's at play there?' He tried to translate what he calls Hughes's 'mad logic' to the screen but found it impossible, and gave up.

I wonder how this relates to Malkovich's own persona. Does he have a sense of how he's seen by the Hollywood establishment? 'Probably as a sort of smart aleck, a loose cannon, I don't know.' I ask why he doesn't do more comedy, since he's often very funny even in his most menacing roles. 'I'm never asked,' he says. 'I think they think I might throw a wobbly or I'll be moody - I don't know what it is. I think people seem to sort of associate me with danger. And I don't see that at all.'

'Are you aware of people reacting to you as if there were some danger involved?'

'Sometimes. But other times, you know, journalists say: you don't seem dangerous, or you don't seem... uh... seductive, or intelligent, or profound. And I've always said I was in complete agreement - but they'll still say... there must be something more than just being a kind of... person, with more or less the normal complications - but generally a lot luckier.'

His life as a person began in 1953. Malkovich grew up in the small mining town of Benton, Illinois. On Christmas Eve of the year he was born there was a large explosion in one of the mines, killing the fathers of many children who would become his schoolfriends. It was not an affluent area, and the career options, Malkovich felt, were either to become a teacher or a prison guard. His mother owned and ran the local newspaper (Malkovich's brother Danny edits it now), and his father edited a conservation magazine. 'My father was a very contradictory man,' Malkovich says. 'I mean, most environmentalists in America in the 1950s - of which there were hardly any - were not... paratroopers. But my father was in the 82nd Airborne, it was just like that.'

Food fights among the five siblings were a regular feature of mealtimes, Malkovich would often wake up with his brother farting on his face, and while their father was inclined to discipline them severely, their mother just turned up the radio. As a schoolchild, Malkovich says, he was very studious, 'but it was rarely what we were studying'. His parents had high hopes for him to become a park ranger in Montana, but he fled to Illinois State University, and got into acting by mistake. He fancied a girl and followed her into the theatre.

Along with Gary Sinise, Joan Allen, and Glenne Headley, whom he later married, Malkovich founded the famous Steppenwolf theatre in Chicago. When their production of True West (in which he based his performance on his own bullying brother) came to New York, he was 'discovered', and began to combine his stage work with cinema. He was nominated for an Oscar for playing a blind man in Places in the Heart, his very first film.

His marriage to Headley allegedly fell apart after he had an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer on the set of Dangerous Liaisons. It was at this point that he went into psychoanalysis, which allowed him to 'have ideas about why I responded in certain ways and why I wouldn't put myself in certain situations again'. While filming The Sheltering Sky, he met Bertolucci's French-Italian assistant, Nicoletta Peyran, with whom he now lives in the south of France. They have two children, Amandine and Loewy.

Malkovich claims never to look back, or forward. He says he has never 'had a career thought', never remembered Benton, Illinois, with relief at his escape, and tells me, borrowing the title of a film he once produced, that he has been an 'accidental tourist' in his own life.

'It never occurred to me when I was young how many lives you have. It's something you can't prepare for. You can't imagine that in two years you may be a German talent agent living between Hamburg and Dusseldorf. And you can be OK. There's the life I lived growing up, there's the life I lived at university, there's the life I lived when we started our theatre, there's the life I lived living in New York and being married, apparently I did plays on Broadway... but one isn't really prepared for that. My life before children I don't really remember. I mean I've heard references to it, but I really don't remember.'

In someone who has had years of psychoanalysis, this may seem a bit surprising. It's partly a joke, of course. But it could also, I suppose, be seen either as a way of living in the moment or as a monumental act of repression. Malkovich thinks of the phases he describes as distinct, consecutive lives rather than a single trajectory. And this stems, perhaps, from his ability, or compulsion, to focus on only a single thing at a time.

He explains that for six or seven years, while they were setting up Steppenwolf, the ensemble had to earn money by getting 'real people's jobs'. 'I did a million things,' he says. 'I worked in an office supply store, I drove a school bus, I painted houses, I worked for a Mexican landscape gardening company, picking out weeds. And generally when I was doing something it somehow took my interest. In fact, it must be a kind of shallowness: when I did office supplies mostly I thought about office supplies, and then when I got on the train I'd think about theatre, and then I would do theatre. But the next morning I would go in and, you know, reorganise the paper clips.'

Maybe this explains the Jell-O diet, I suggest. How can you not get sick of Jell-O? 'I can have incredible self-discipline,' he says. 'But see, I think it's obviously a form of stupidity: "I'll just get interested in Jell-O, then, and forget there are other foods".' He does an impression of himself as a hilariously possessed child. 'It's a sort of, "Oh! Jell-O! Wow, I could have green, or red, and, you know, after a couple of months maybe I could put some banana in there..." '

There's a scene in Being John Malkovich in which the eponymous hero everyone would like to be turns out to be just an ordinary guy in a baseball cap. After almost an entire film's worth of suave life in a swanky apartment, we see John Malkovich stranded on the hard shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike. Someone drives by in a truck and irreverently throws a tin can at his head: 'Hey! Malkovich!' they shout, 'Think fast!' He tells me he fought hard to keep that scene in because it reminded him of the way he used to be treated as a kid, and made him laugh.

So perhaps his former lives are not so far from his mind as he suggests. Or maybe the idea is that he doesn't know any more than the next person how they all fit together. Life for Malkovich, you imagine, is always less explainable than absurd. I say it must have taken a lot of confidence to star in a film whose entire premise is to take the piss out of him. Early on in the movie, someone says: 'Who the fuck is John Malkovich?' But he clearly thinks it's hilarious. For the first time since I've been with him, he actually bursts out laughing. 'I love that line,' he says. 'Who the fuck is John Malkovich?!'